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Botwiki.org is an open-source collection of tutorials, articles, datasets and other resources for creating useful, interesting, artistic and friendly online bots -- smart software agents that do fun or useful stuff -- for Twitter, Slack, IRC and other online networks.
Botwiki.org also lets you browse these bots by various categories, such as:
and more.
Botwiki is powered by Pico (official documentation), which is a very simple CMS running on PHP. It uses the Twig templating language. The content of the site is created with Markdown.
There is a few ways you can contribute to Botwiki.
If you see an error on any of the pages, you can open a new issue where you describe the problem and if you know, you can also suggest a solution.
To add a new bot, you have a few options.
The easiest way is to use the submission form at botwiki.org/submit-your-bot. After filling out the information, your bot will be added to the queue for manual review.
Another option is to send a pull request to this repo.
Things you will need to install and be/get familiar with:
The above will be fine if you want to use a site like dillinger.io to preview your updates. You can use this site to see if your Markdown text looks okay, check if links are working -- but you won't be able to see images.
So, start by cloning the repo:
git clone [email protected]:botwiki/botwiki.org.git
All the content is inside the content folder. Let's see how we'd go about adding a new Twitter bot called "my_new_bot"
The structure of the file is very simple, here's an example from the Twitter bot that posts about holidays for each day.
/*
Title: @holidaybot4000
Description: Every day IS a holiday
Author: Stefan Bohacek
Date: July 21, 2015
Tags: twitter,twitterbot,active,node.js,nodejs,node,holidays,images,flags,useful,fourtonfish
Nav: hidden
Robots: index,follow
*/
[](https://twitter.com/holidaybot4000)
[@holidaybot4000](https://twitter.com/holidaybot4000) is a Twitter bot that tweets holidays around the world for the given day, typically together with an image of the country's flag. It was created by [@fourtonfish](https://twitter.com/fourtonfish).
The Title should be the name of the bot. I include the "@" for bots on Twitter. The Description should be short and it shows up on the search page or when you browse the content of the site by tags.
The Author should be your name (or Twitter handle, or your stage name), as the author of the page. (Although, I don't think this shows up anywhere right now.)
Date will be today's date. It should also be updated in case you're doing a major change to an existing page.
I recommend as many useful tags as possible. You can browse the website or open some of the files to see what some common tags are, but be sure to include whether the bot is active or inactive, some basic keywords, for example images if the bot posts or handles images in any way, and if the bot has publicly available source code, be sure to include the open source and opensource tags. (This is necessary due to the limitations of the search feature.)
You can keep the Nav and Robots values as they are. Nav: hidden just means that the bot won't show up in the main navigation, like the About, Bots, Tutorials, etc pages.
Now, you will also need to go to your bot's page and take a screenshot that shows how the bot works. There is no set requirement for the height, since every bot may need different amount of space to show what it does, but the width should be 900px.
The screenshot must be in the .png format and also needs to match the name of the bot used for the page Title. If you have spaces in your Title, change them to _ in the image file name.
The screenshot itself should be in the images folder inside the folder where you added your bot. I also recommend downloading a program like ImageOptim (OSX) or Trimage (Linux, Windows, OSX) to optimize the size of the image.
You can then use dillinger.io to check if the content of your .md file renders correctly. If everything looks good, go ahead and open a pull request so that your updates can be reviewed and merged.
If you prefer to run the site on your computer, you will also need:
After cloning the project:
cd botwiki.org
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar install
Make sure everything installs correctly, otherwise you will see an error that looks like this:
Class 'ParsedownExtra' not found in /home/stefan/Desktop/Untitled Folder/botwiki.org/lib/pico.php on line 152
To run the site on our local machine:
php -S localhost:5000
Tip: You can also create an alias for this command, so that you can execute it in an easier way.
Just type nano ~/.bash_profile in your command line, then add the line below:
alias phpserver='php -S localhost:5000'
Hit ctrl + X to close the document, save it. Finally, run source ~/.bash_profile. Now you can just open the botwiki.org folder and run phpserver in your terminal.
How neat is that!
Note: The port number, which is 5000 here, can be pretty much any number.
Then, we will go to the content/bots/twitterbots folder. We can make a copy of one of the files and rename it to my_new_bot.md.
Once you're done, you will be able to go to localhost:5000/bots/twitterbots/my_new_bot and see your newly added bot.
If you want to mess with the look of the site, you will need to also install node (which comes with npm).
Then, from the root directory, you can run:
sudo npm install
First run the site as above:
php -S localhost:5000
And then (in a new terminal window) run the gulp tasks, simply with:
gulp
The site will be available with live-reloading at http://localhost:3000.
If you for some reason get an error about a node package missing, just install it with
sudo npm install NAME_OF_THE_PACKAGE --save-dev
If you'd like to contribute outside of GitHub, you can send an email to [email protected]. Simply copy the content of this file and replace it with relevant information.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me using the email above or on Twitter.